The Age of the Image

Now Available

“Steve Apkon is one of the leading visualists and educators of the day, and this
sumptuously-detailed and profound new book should be required reading for
anyone who thinks about how to effectively communicate in this new world
of screens.”

– JONATHAN DEMMEAcademy Award-winning director

"Can there be anything more to say about the ascent of the image in our
contemporary world? Yes! And Steve Apkon has said it in his timely, acutely
perceptive and often impassioned book which sets the rise of visual language
in the context of the long history of communication."

– SIMON SCHAMA, Historian

“Steve Apkon is one of the leading visualists and educators of the day, and this
sumptuously detailed and profound new book should be required reading for
anyone who thinks about how to effectively communicate in this new world
of screens.”

– JONATHAN DEMMEAcademy Award-winning director

"The Age of the Image lays out the tools we need to cultivate our awareness of and attention
to every message and every gesture, artistic or opportunistic, expressed in print or in pixels.
It's not just a plea for literacy, but a wonderful road map and guide for how it can be taught
and nurtured."

– MARTIN SCORSESEForeword

The Age of the Image

Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

Stephen Apkon; Foreword by Martin Scorsese Farrar, Straus and Giroux

We live in a world awash in images. The recent technological revolutions in video recording, editing, and distribution are more akin to the development of moveable type than any other such revolution in the last five hundred years. And yet, most of us are not aware of the grammar of visual communication, the coded messages of its style, or the practical components of its production. We are largely, in a word, illiterate.

In The Age of the Image, Apkon draws on the history of literacy, on the science of how storytelling works on the human brain, and on the value of literacy in real-world situations, and argues that now is the time to transform the way we teach, create, and communicate so that we can all step forward together into a rich and stimulating future.

News

Stephen Apkon highlights how storytelling is an underlying influence of new media and technology. Images are powerful because of the physiology of our brains that make the act of seeing a constant creative experience.

What do we really know and understand about the “grammar” and the structure of visual communication? How are stories and our appreciation of them, different when we watch them, as opposed to reading them?
How will this new realm of visual literacy shape our children and how they see and set out to change the world?

“By turns profound and practical, The Age of the Image can be a soulfully erudite companion to the technical manuals in film schools, or a handbook for audiences wanting to deepen their experience of media.”

Scorsese argues that we need to "stress visual literacy in the schools", citing The Age of the Image. "We need to do away with the distinctions between the verbal and the visual. . . .At the end, there really is only literacy".(more)

Events

Massachusetts

Projects

overlay

Jacob Burns Film Center

Founder and Executive Director

The Jacob Burns Film Center (JBFC) is a nonprofit cultural arts center dedicated to: presenting the best of independent, documentary, and world cinema; promoting 21st century literacy; and making film a vibrant part of the community.

In 1998, Stephen Apkon and a group of individuals interested in creating a cultural arts center in Westchester County purchased the old Rome Theater in Pleasantville, New York. Since the JBFC opened in June 2001, more than two million people have seen over 4,500 films from every corner of the globe, and over 100,000 students have participated in JBFC's education programs.

The demand for these programs led the JBFC to build the Media Arts Lab, a 27,000 square-foot state-of-the-art facility equipped with 16 editing suites, a recording studio, a soundstage, a 60-seat screening room, and an animation studio. JBFC's faculty now present dozens of courses in multimedia storytelling for children, teens, and adults.

Enlistment Days

A film by Ido Haar

Produced by Ido Haar and Stephen Apkon

Israel, 2012

Four young men—from Israel, the US, Russia, and France—are about to enter the military. Each has his own unique story, but they all share a common experience as they are transformed from civilians to soldiers. This perceptive documentary looks into the private lives of enlistees to uncover the subtle strategies that foster ideas of nationalism, manliness, and the willingness to forgo personal freedom in the name of country.

overlay

I'm Carolyn Parker: the Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful

Directed and produced by Jonathan Demme.

Produced by Stephen Apkon, Lindsay Jaeger, and Daniel Wolff.

Edited by Ido Haar.

Carolyn Parker was the last to leave her neighborhood when a mandatory evacuation order was decreed as Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans in the summer of 2005. After the floodwaters subsided, Mrs. Parker was the first resident to return to her now flood-devastated community with what many thought was the "impossible dream" of bringing her ruined home back to life.

I'm Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful unfolds as an inspiring portrait of an extraordinary woman. Mrs. Parker takes us deep inside her personal biography as a child born in the 40's, raised in segregated New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, who became a teen-ager joining the front lines in the Civil Rights movement of the 60's, who worked for thirty years as a cook-turned-chef in the hotel industry, and became one of the most outspoken voices in the fight for every New Orleanian's right to return home after the devastation of the floods that followed Katrina.

The Patron

About

Photo: Lynda Shenkman Curtis

Mr. Apkon, a social entrepreneur, formed the Jacob Burns Film Center, with a vision of establishing a center for independent, foreign and documentary films and education. Under his 13 year tenure as Executive Director, the JBFC grew to become a major cultural destination and a national leader in the field of visual literacy. In May, 2014 Mr. Apkon stepped down as the Executive Director of the JBFC to focus on film projects and other non-profit initiatives.

Mr. Apkon serves on the boards of The World Cinema Foundation and Advancing Human Rights. He is President of Big 20 Productions, the producer of Enlistment Days directed by Ido Haar and a producer of I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful directed by Jonathan Demme. He is currently in production as director and producer of Peaceful Warriors.

A native of Framingham, MA, Mr. Apkon graduated from Georgetown University in 1983. In 1986, he received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, where he graduated with distinction. In 2012 he received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Pace University.
He is the author of The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in April 2013, in which he convincingly argues that now is the time to transform the way we teach, create, and communicate so that we can all step forward together into a rich and stimulating future.